Lasagna

With all the rain this past weekend, I had a hankering for lasagna. Now I have my own recipe, that I may cover in another post, which is pretty conventional but what I was craving was Tim's special lasagna. And I wasn't brave enough to make it on my own. Fortunately for me, he was off yesterday and was in the mood to cook. I assisted, but this was definitely his gig.

For this delight, you need bolognese sauce, fresh pasta, and bechamel sauce. Three things - easy, right? 

First, you make the pasta. Granted, you can substitute commercial pasta here but I promise, it won't be as good. We chose to make green pasta which tastes essentially the same but is so much more attractive! By weight, take 2 parts flour, 1 part egg and a 1/2 part cooked, chopped spinach. We weigh the eggs first (2 eggs should make plenty of pasta) and then determine how much flour and spinach. Mix them in the stand mixer with the dough hook to make a ball like this:

Then use a pasta roller to roll out the dough into sheets. We have a stand mixer attachment for this. [Note: both these steps can be done manually but it will take a bit longer.]

In heavily salted water (think: it tastes like the ocean), boil noodles for about 2 minutes. Then remove and place in a big bowl of cool water.

Then, on to the bechamel! We basically use Mario Batali recipe. You can read the full version if you want, but here is the basic idea.

Melt 5 tablespoons of butter over medium high heat and add 4 tablespoons of flour. Stir pretty close to constantly until flour is cooked. In a separate pan (or the microwave), heat 4 cups of milk to almost a boil. Add one cup at a time to flour/butter mix. Stir constantly. When all the milk is added, bring to a boil and cook for a few minutes, still stirring. Take off heat and let cool a bit and thicken.

We thawed out some bolognese we made the other day to use. We have a big pan so I used 3 batches. For a more standard pan, you can probably use one.

You layer as follows: meat sauce, bechamel, noodles. Repeat until you run out of sauce but make sure the top layer is meat and bechamel sauce.

Bake at 350 until brown on top and bubbly on the sides. We tend to broil at the end for extra crispy goodness.

Our big pan (15x10x2) yields 12 portions. Personally, I had it for dinner yesterday and then for breakfast, lunch and dinner today. It is well worth the work.

Cost:

$12.04 Bolognese sauce

$1.45 Bechamel sauce

$1.16 Pasta

Total: $14.65 or $1.22 per serving (12 servings total.)